Top Tips for Maximizing Your Website Redesign

By Samantha Schultz | Yahoo Small Business

Top Tips for Maximizing Your Website RedesignAre you gearing up for a website redesign, just a template refresh, or a webpage optimization? Depending on your business, the discovery process your website redesign team will go through will vary. Here are a few tips to create a winning collaboration and get what you need out of your project!

Interviews

Starting from the sales process through the website discovery, your website redesign team will ask you a ton of questions so they can tease out what is important and what is not. Here are a few questions you can expect:

What do you know about your website visitors? Do you know what content they visit often, WHO they are and what content is important to them?

What are your brand values? A website should convey exactly who you are so you align with customers that will be loyal and brand stewards.

What business goals are you trying to achieve? Your team will want to promote calls to action, functions that are key to business success (we need leads! we need users to sign up for a demo!)

Who owns the business logic for your current website? I.E. who can we expect to work with to get answers on everything from “who should get notified after this form is submitted” to “who has the login for your current host environment?”. It’s never too early to get introductions started for all the company team members that will be involved.

Research

Did you panic when reading the above list? Not to worry – for anything that may be missing, a well-trained team is able to help dig out information required to make the project a success. Research tasks related to discovery may involve:

Customer usability testing – tools like Usertesting.com make it easy to collect feedback on what you should improve from the current website.

Customer interviews – your team can easily get feedback from customers about the functions, layouts they are looking for with the new website. This can involve wireframes of the proposed new website or simply an open format interview to collect a variety of feedback.

Staff interviews – your team can also collect business logic or a wish list so the project requirements document is complete.

Data mining – your team can also review analytics platforms, sales data to set realistic website goals with the new website.

Consulting

Finally – any trustworthy website team will be able to guide you through best practices, trends and technology. Don’t be shy to express your opinion on where the new website should go!

If you are in need of a solid website redesign team, please give us a shout.